Assignment Four: Evaluation

Composing Schedule:

First Draft for Peer Review: Monday 22nd April

Second Draft for Peer Review: Wednesday 24th April

Polished Draft: Friday 26th April

Rationale of Assignment Four:

In your future as students in the university and when you enter the workplace, you will be required to evaluate articles, books, ideas, policies, and even the performance of teammates or other employees at your company. Therefore, in this assignment, you will practice evaluation, a strategy that that you will use in the university and beyond.

Writing Situation

You are a member of a team of website writing consultants at Right Writing, Inc. A leading activist organization has recently contracted with you to evaluate their current website to see if it needs to be revised or not in terms of how effectively the website argues for the cause it supports. You know that the best way to evaluate the site is to compare and contrast other activist websites, basing your evaluation on an appropriate set of criteria

The Assignment

Decide on an activist organization that you would like to work for on a consulting basis. No websites about legalizing drugs or websites about the abortion debate. To help you decide, visit the sites of several activist organizations to consider their fundamental objectives and the quality of their websites. Although your readers will expect an authoritative evaluation from you, they will also appreciate a balanced judgment that acknowledges the weaknesses and strengths of their website. This will require you to concede that some features of the website can remain unchanged while other aspects need revising. One of the ways you can establish authority with your readers is to employ the strategy of compare and contrast to demonstrate that you understand what makes an activist organization’s website an effective argument. Therefore, select another activist organization’s website to compare and contrast with your organization’s website. To help you evaluate, you will need to think about specific criteria that would apply to all websites in general, then to activist websites specifically.

Composition

As your textbook explains, an evaluation requires the following:

  • you state your evaluative claim (this website is a more effective visual effective argument than the other website)
  • identify and explain your criteria, that is, what makes a website an effective argument
  • match your subject, that is your websites to the criteria you have identified.

Since you are evaluating two activist websites to see which is the more effective argument, you will be using comparison/contrast to organize your paper.

There are two basic patterns for comparison contrast: block by block or point by point:

Block by Block /

Point by Point

  • Introduction and thesis (evaluative claim)
  • Explanation of criteria
  • Subject A and in what ways it matches the four evaluative criteria
  • Subject B and in what ways it matches the four evaluative criteria
  • Conclusion
/
  • Introduction and thesis (evaluative claim)
  • Explanation of criteria
  • Criteria 1 for subject A and B
  • Criteria 2 for subject A and B
  • Criteria 3 for subject A and B
  • Criteria 4 for subject A and B
  • Conclusion

Either method can work well, but generally the point by point method is more effective when you have more than one or two criteria.

Heuristics

Research

  1. Find two activist websites you find interesting (either two opposing websites or two websites that support the same cause); then write down the URLs and a short justification for why you should work on these websites

Composing

  1. When you have selected your two websites, you must develop at least four criteria for evaluation. You should write a paragraph that explains the criteria you will use.
  1. Then write a paragraph for each of the criteria you have identified showing how well the websites match those criteria. Clearly the point by point method is going work best as a method of organization.
  1. Merge the individual parts (the criteria for each subject), you have written so far. Then write your introduction that conveys your purpose and your conclusion that suggests what changes should be made to the website to make it an even more effective argument.